VoIP network operators who are trying to achieve a high level of service availability need to monitor their network from an end-to-end view. Current error detection tools typically monitor the service provider's core portion of the network, ignore access portions of the network and have ambiguous categorization of access network defects. Very often, performance data showing a healthy core network does not necessarily mean a healthy access network. From a customer point of view, network providers who only monitor core network performance often does not provide the same view of the end-to-end performance of the services experienced by the customer.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for monitoring end-to-end performance in a packet-switched network, e.g., a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network.